THREE months into the war in Gaza, thousands of Palestinians, including a large number of children, have been martyred by the Israeli Defence Forces. What is the end goal of Israel for which it has unleashed unprecedented death and destruction? Israel’s stated objective is that it wants to destroy Hamas. This is not credible because Israel is meting out genocide-like collective punishment to all Palestinians, and not just Hamas.
Is Israel’s goal, then, to create a ‘greater Israel’ by forcibly pushing the Palestinians into neighbouring Arab countries or elsewhere? If that be the objective, Israel has certainly overestimated what its brutal force can achieve, and underestimated the resilience of Palestinians, who seem determined not to leave the land on which their ancestors had lived for millennia.